For a bibliophile, there are few things more telling about the book at hand than an epigraph. Those intriguing quotations, sayings, snippets of songs, or poems that appear just before Chapter One do more than set the tone for the experience ahead; the epigraph informs us about the author's sensibility. Are we in the hands of a literalist or a wit? A cynic or a romantic? A writer of great ambition or a miniaturist? The epigraph hints at hidden stories, and frequently contains one of its own. Edited by Rosemary Ahern, who also provides commentary, the book collects 250 epigraphs from five centuries of literature. From the cumbersome but amusing prefaces found in early novels like Don Quixote and Gulliver's Travels to the crisp and clever epigrams that Hemingway and Fitzgerald made fashionable in the 20th century, this collection traces not only the art of the epigraph, but also the history of the book.